Experimentalist composer John Cage is famous for his piece 4’33”, which is just silence of just that length. Recently, Mike Batt composed a piece of minute-long silence for an album. But, Cage’s lawyers didn't take kindly to that.
Mike Batt, the man behind the Wombles and Vanessa Mae, has put a silent 60-second track on the album of his latest classical chart-topping protégés, the Planets. This has enraged representatives of the avant-garde, experimentalist composer John Cage, who died in 1992. The silence on his group’s album clearly sounds uncannily like 4’33”, the silence composed by Cage in his prime. [...]
Stupid lawyers. (Link from Adam Shand’s Word Up mailing list)
Interestingly, John Cage’s experiment with 4’33” was not about silence, but rather about creating music out of non-traditional sounds, in this case the sounds in the audience during the performance. Coughs, creaking chairs, the occasional dropped program booklet, these sounds all would make up the “music” of the performance, never the same twice.
I find it ironic, then, that Cage’s “representatives” are claiming that the silent recorded track is copying 4’33”; the nature of a silent recording is fundamentally different than Cage’s experiment, which depended on a live performance, and wasn’t actually silence at all.
The Magnetic Fields has a bit of silence (the article says it’s 4’33” worth but I’m not sure about it) between two albums that were later re-released on one CD. The article also says it’s a joke, but Stephin Merrit (the main guy from MF) says it’s along the lines of a tribute. As far as I’ve heard the MF weren’t sued for it.
Here’s an article about silence in music:
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/music/99/02/04/SMALL_MOUTH.html
A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate.